EXACTLY 41 years ago yesterday, then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe in his inaugural speech promised a democratic ethos. He promised Zimbabweans across cultural, ethnic and racial divides that they had the same rights and obligations.
Mugabe, as it occurred, never meant it and Zimbabwe’s independence from colonialism has been as pyrrhic as the promises made were never fulfilled.
Some 41 years on, true independence for many Zimbabweans remains a mirage. The promise of freedom has been deferred by the power-hungry and parasitic elite in Zanu PF.
Lies have short legs.
When then Zanu (PF) leader took to the podium on April 18, 1980, to proclaim a new brand of politics in his famous “ploughshares” speech, it left even sceptical whites eating out of his palm and few would have put their money against Mugabe turning into the depot he morphed into up to the time he was pushed out of office by his own Zanu PF comrades in 2017.
His successor Emmerson Mnangagwa was one of the young turks within the victorious “rebels” turned revolutionaries who had taken Ian Smith and his haughty regime to the negotiating table screaming and kicking before the first all-race election won by Zanu PF.
Few would have hedged their bets on Mnangagwa proclaiming a “new kind of politics” 37 years into Mugabe’s tortured reign. But he, like Mugabe before him, seems to be already showing signs of deviating from his self-allocated path.
Citizens not aligned to the ruling Zanu PF party still go to bed with doors barricaded because they are scared of nocturnal visits by State security agents 41 years after independence. Citizens still need guts to question authority in their country. When he assumed power after upstaging Mugabe in a November 2017 coup, Mnangagwa presented himself as a servant of the people. He even declared that the people were his masters, but with each passing day he is legislating himself into a “demigod”.
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Zimbabweans need to do more, get more involved in the governance of their country and wrest power from a created elite.
Beyond the politics, Zimbabweans need their independence and nobody will give them. They will have to find a way around the labyrinth of civil-military structure that has basically captured the State and usurped the people’s independence for which tens of thousands paid the ultimate price with their lives.
Dozens of wartime heroes, among them Herbert Chitepo, Jason Ziyaphapha Moyo and Josiah Magama Tongogara should be turning in their graves. This is not what they envisaged. This is not independence. And to celebrate it would be a betrayal of what those people who fought so valiantly to end colonialism wished for.
It’s not yet uhuru for Zimbabwe. Like Mugabe before him, Mnangagwa has eaten his promises.
